The Old Halloween Beeldenstorm
The warm Middle Ages were over; the Little Ice Age of modernity was beginning.
Within a gothic chapel stood a man, his hand at the hilt of his blood stained saber.
Standing with his back to the door of the chapel, he looked ahead to the illuminated high altar, glowing in a blue light shining from the brilliant stained glass surrounding the chapel's walls; the light of seven windows depicting in an iconic fashion the life of the Virgin and her Son both converging at his death at Calvary and culminating at the coronation of the Queen of Heaven.
"Bring me my hammer, Piet," said the man, growling.
His murderous glare was fixed to the altar, thereupon standing a golden monstrance shaped as a crucifix exposing the white Eucharistic host.
Before the altar knelt a man, his head covered in a rider's helmet, wearing an suit of armor.
"One of my men?" said the man. "Kneeling before that idol?"
A figure rose up from the ground like a shadow standing behind the man.
"You requested a hammer, Master Wouter?"
Wouter turned his pale blue eyes to the shadow.
"Indeed. We must smash this temple of papist idolatry to bits!"
"So I shall grant you the hammer, but first, tell me...how did you find yourself in this dreary place?"
"Ah...well..."
Wouter touched his forehead. Blood stained his fingers, spilling from a gash indenting his skull.
"What is this?"
"Oh, you really have forgotten...let me remind you, for I saw it all unfold from the very beginning. You were born in a village along the Scheldt river, yes?
In 1533?"
"That's right."
"And you grew up with your brothers and sisters, working as a ploughman until...well, you wanted some adventure. A chance to go out and become a real man. So you joined a group of men, your Flemish countrymen; determined to destroy that great evil in the world."
"-The Whore of Babylon. Rome," said Wouter gritting his teeth.
"And you succeeded! Desecrating the altars of Ghent and Antwerp...defiling all that was offensive to reason...I was there with you all-though you did not perceive me corporeally-until one night of revelry and play, that festival day of the wine harvest."
Wouter recalled the day.
It was Martinmas, old Halloween Day, November 11th, before the Gregorian Calendar reform retroactively calculated that same date to be October 31st, 1566.
It was a day when bonfires were lit about the freshly harvested fields and children paraded with lanterns along the river and throughout the town until they were shooed home by their mothers as Wouter's gang neared the village.
Into the village church they took hammers and axes and turned all but the tabernacle, hidden away by the village priest, into rubble.
A sympathizer of their cause offered them lodging, all thirteen, to send them off to Bruges and dismantle the devilish trappings of that accursed basilica there.
"Smash it all to bits! Especially that wretched relic they house!" cried the sympathizer.
"Especially that!" said Wouter's second in command, Piet the Red.
As they schemed sacramental destruction, they made off with the sympathizer's wine and headed into the fields beside the bonfires.
The first wine harvest of the year filled plenty of jugs, cups, bowls and hands to be slurped from on that feast of the erstwhile-soldier and bishop Saint Martin of Tours;
and nobody in town feasted more eagerly than Wouter's gang while they cursed the very saint of the day's namesake and his fiendish popery.
"Today we feast in honor of the Harvest! For the honor of God and no other! For saints? What hocus pocus...we living men alone are saints, the living servants of God on earth, not some pope-worshipping dead corpses eaten by worms!"
Wouter finished his speech, toasting his drunken crew, all lifting their wine goblets high in the amber glow of a tremendous fire.
The sun was beginning to set at that afternoon hour, the sun an orange disc hovering over darkening fields and forests.
"And damn all those who oppose us," said Piet to Wouter's elder brother Willem.
Willem and Wouter looked just alike except for Willem's long brown hair instead of Wouter's yellow mane. Otherwise, both were gaunt in face and sported neatly trimmed moustaches. Both had the same striking blue eyes.
Both were farmers and both wanted something beyond the monotony of the sickle and the ploughshare; joining the cause of the iconoclasts seemed to be an obvious answer to their yearning for sporting adventure.
Wouter turned to Willem, his goblet spilling at its topped off brim.
"What do you say, brother?! To God and our countrymen! The first idol of that damned Martin I find, I will turn into a fine arquebus powder! And then we can take turns at target practice with the next idol we find! What say you?"
Willem sipped from his cup and said, "You haven't smashed enough statues this night, brother?"
Wouter stood about the remains of the patron saint of the village church, namely the decapitated stone head of the cephalophore St. Denis under his boot.
"Why, no! No, dear Brother! So long as a single papist image remains in this world it will never be enough!...and damn anyone who thinks otherwise! Where is he? Where is that rotting corpse *Saint* Martin? Oh! There he lies-under my foot."
He kicked the head of St. Denis like a football to the laughs and taunts of his comrades.
As the head rolled, a soldier on a white horse galloped up to the gang.
He was clad in the dress of a man from a distant age, the style of an imperial Roman.
"What a strange fellow you are," said Wouter as his comrades' mouths looked upon the horseman with dropped jaws.
"You men wish to fight, yes?" asked the horseman.
"It is what we live for, right, men?!" said a bellowing Wouter.
"You are looking for devils to combat?" he asked again.
"You know us well then, master horseman," said Wouter licking his teeth.
The horseman pointed to a mist shrouded mound of boulders a mile away, something that would constitute a hill in the low countries.
"Then I have a mission for you: there, upon that mound you will find a clan of demons sent by Beelzebub himself.
But do not be deceived: though they are unseen corporeally they are intimately present upon that rock.
If you are able to do battle with them, to reject their sinister will, I foresee a place in paradise shall await you."
"An easy task! For we are slayers of devilish idols!" said Piet to the ayes of his brethren.
The men raised their cups and cheered.
"To the mound of Beelzebub, men!" said Wouter wiping his moustache of wine.
The gang scampered off, leaving the horseman beside the fire.
Only Willem accompanied the soldier, the two reaching the rock a few minutes after the others. Climbing up the narrow path, steep and slippery with gravel and loose rocks, big and small, the two met Wouter's gang at the top.
Deep in the mist encircling the peak of the rock, the gang felt about the space blindly.
"Where are ye, devils? Where are ye?" shouted Wouter swinging his hammer at the mist.
Willem turned to the sun, now having lowered nearly enough to officiate dusk.
The mist cleared.
Thunderheads rolled above the men.
Cloaked in a dark gray sky, before the men stood a wooden crucifix, fourteen feet tall, depicting the man of sorrows.
The image of the crucified man looked down to them, his eyes painted a bloodshot red; streams of blood leaking from his five sacred wounds: his feet, hands, and side.
Wouter threw himself into a rage. He took up his sword and hammer and commanded the others:
"Look! Here is none other than Beelzebub! Cut the demon down from his tree!"
Wouter charged at the cross. His sword drawn, thunder rumbled in the night's sky.
"No, Brother."
Willem stood between Wouter and the crucifix.
Wouter shook his head. "You, my elder brother, even. You ought to know better...this is an idol! A graven image, as the second commandment implores us, it is an abomination that must be destroyed!"
Willem stood firm.
"It is the image of our crucified Lord, Wouter."
Wouter laughed, then stepped forward, standing face to face with Willem.
"Move, Brother!"
Willem stood firm.
"Move!" said Piet the Red holding an axe behind his commander.
"No," said Willem, a dread filled expression in his eyes.
Wouter wrestled his way forward, his left hand gripping Willem's, his sword in his right.
"Move!!"
Willem slumped forward, head first.
Wouter's sword had pierced Willem through the chest pinning him to the base of the crucifix.
The horseman galloped forward as a flash of lightning blinded the gang.
"Murderer!" cried the horseman.
Thunder rumbled again.
The other eleven fled, tumbling down the mound.
In the commotion, Wouter sprang with his comrades, sliding and slipping down the narrow path to the bottom.
Lightning cracked.
Then came a rumble of a different cause:
Half ton boulders came rolling down the path.
Wouter lay at the bottom of the mound.
A boulder was pressed to his gut and the ground covered in red autumnal foliage and red red blood.
Immobile, he groaned, his comrades evidently buried alive, or more mercifully killed by the rock-slide, or run off like cowards:
in his helpless state he wheezed a cry for Piet the Red, then for Brother Willem.
Finally, his breath all spent, he kept mum.
Standing above Wouter's body was a ghostly creature that had known him his entire life. His visage mournful he said, "This is where I leave you, Wouter. May God have mercy on you, I have done all I could."
Wouter rose from the ground. He was again standing at the gates of the shimmering blue chapel.
A horseman wearing a red mitre approached the altar next to the kneeling man.
Paying homage to the Eucharist, he knelt and prostrated himself making the sign of the cross.
Wouter turned away from the pious display, looking back to the shadow figure.
"Now I remember...but how am I here? Alive?"
"Alive?? You think you're alive?" said the creature giggling.
The kneeling man's helmet was removed by the soldier. Great long brown locks fell forth.
"Willem!" shouted Wouter. "Willem! You're alive! Oh, thank...God, you're..."
A great white light beamed from the monstrance. Covered in the light, the horseman and Willem stepped up past the altar rail, up to the high altar before they vanished from Wouter's sight.
"Willem! Willem!!" said Willem's brother.
"I'll make whomever did this crime pay! Pay with his blood! Make him suffer...!"
The creature still giggled.
"And why are you laughing?" said Wouter, snarling.
"*You* killed him, and now you're making a fuss?" chuckled the creature.
"But...I didn't mean to do it...He made me! It was that idol he was protecting! That wicked popery! That was what killed him! That!"
Wouter pointed a shaking finger to the cruciform monstrance, to the white host, pulsing in its glass casing like a beating heart.
"That diabolic refuse is the foulest idol of them all!"
He lurched forward, beginning to charge the altar with his drawn sword before a voice spoke gently, serenely in his ear:
"No."
Wouter stuttered.
"N-no...Lord. Oh, Lord..."
The calm voice spoke again:
"Lord? I never knew you...Depart from me, you worker of iniquity."
The chapel doors flung open.
Wouter looked to the ceiling.
There aloft was the crucified man, taller than the heavens. A host of multi-winged creatures spiraled up and down his tree, up into the firmament, down to earth, hoisting the souls of men towards a brilliant light.
Enraged, Wouter fled the chapel, cursing the light.
Outside the gates, the shadow handed him the hammer he had once used diligently in the desecration of altars across his native land.
Now in that place of darkness, he cursed and cursed, in the darkness of wailing and gnashing of teeth, alongside his gang, alongside that creature who had accompanied him in all of his sinful pursuits.
The creature was a featureless and grim shadow no longer.
In its true form it turned to Wouter and spoke:
"Look! Here is none other than Beelzebub! Cut the demon down from his tree!"
Wouter screamed in terror as he looked upon the creature's face and never did he stop his screaming.
Thus began Wouter's ice age; his age of fire, his age of darkness and terror.
His hammer of blasphemy in hand, saints and seraphim dim distant stars; all as he wished.
His judgement swift, that place of the serene light had shut its gates on him forever on that Old Halloween night, 1566.
